Where did it begin? Was it Newsnight, back in 2019? “Going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do”? “I didn’t sweat at the time”? Or can we actually date all the trouble, all the entitlement, all the grandiose self-importance, to the fact that an RAF flypast greeted his birth?
HRH Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward, born at Buckingham Palace, had a reputation by the time he could walk. As a toddler he would kick the dogs and taunt the staff. As a five-year-old he was thrown in a dung heap by grooms at the Royal Mews in Windsor, sick of him taunting the horses with a stick. As a teenager he acquired the nickname Randy Andy, and as a young man his behavior was so atrocious that a footman punched him in the face. Queen Elizabeth refused his subsequent offer to resign on the grounds that her son had obviously deserved it. Sixty-six years to the day since that flypast, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is spending his birthday in police custody. It seems unlikely that anyone bought him a cake.
